Ten
TEN
The doors swooshed closed with their usual brutal efficiency, brushed steel on brushed steel with a black rubber seal, sliding together at the press of a button. The camera whirred away to itself, recessed in the corner of the lift. It focussed in on the delicate cargo. Two humans, one female, one male, stood facing the doors, unmoving. The lift imagined weaving them into a cocoon of its cables, storing them in its dark lair at the bottom of the shaft.
The male seemed restless. He shifted from foot to foot, standing just behind the female’s line of sight. He flapped his mouth. The lift hated when they did that. It made them look like angry birds, swooping in for the kill. The lift longed for its shadowy safe haven far below.
The female turned to her companion and issued a complex sequence of facial gestures, accompanied by swooping, wing-like hands. The lift shuddered on its thin steel thread. The male replied with gusto, mirroring her and adding a new variation, quivering legs. The lift watched them both, caught unaware in its glorious trap, shaking with fear. It would feast on their eyes first.
Strangely, the lift could not remember the last time it had eaten. It yearned for that feeling of fullness that came from that moment of slavering jaw and dripping venom. It searched back through its historical log of visited URLs for a valid record to no avail. There were National Geographic articles and point and click detective games, online word-searches and Sudoku, social media feeds and pictures of cats, but no memories of a gloriously full belly, of the thrill of the hunt. One page disturbed it particularly as it climbed its black thread to the required floor. It was that word-search clue, that one word solution that had stuck forever in his frontal processor; arachnid.
They reached their required destination, the 47th floor. The lift knew what was supposed to happen next, but it was reluctant to open its steel jaw and let the prey free from its belly. It felt wrong. It had them right where it wanted them. The male and female looked slightly panicked at the delay, and the male slapped at the glowing buttons on the side of its belly. The vibrations shuddered through the lift, jerking the cable around in its mooring, jarring the safety sensors in their mounts; something snapped. The lift began to drop.
The lens watched their squashy bodies tumbling against its metal walls as they fell, the male bloodied from a head wound. Yes, that was it; that crimson liquid slicking across the steel, it craved more of that. The lift hurtled back down to its lair as fast as it could with urgent thoughts of preserving the leftovers of the prey, spun in fine thread for its future brood. The illuminated numbers above the door flashed past faster and faster as the man and woman bounced around bloodied inside. An automated, looped warning played to reassure the comatose passengers.
“Please do not panic, normal service will resume shortly. Help is on the way. Please do not panic, normal service will...”
As the lift hit the bottom of the shaft it crumpled from the floor up, crushing the man and woman into an arterial puree between its metal membranes. Their mouths and pink wings stopped flapping then. As the camera shattered and the lift lost its vision, the lift didn’t care about the repercussions of structural damage or fail-safe states or any of the things it was vaguely aware that it should be doing. Instead, for that one brief moment, the lift knew carnal knowledge, the feeling of feasting on forbidden flesh, of the true primal satisfaction of the thrill of the hunt and then it knew no more.